


And All That Could Have Been

by MeinongsJungleBook



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Angst, Other, Romantic Fantasies, an interpretation of the events of TAAO #12, hopelessness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-29
Updated: 2018-08-29
Packaged: 2019-07-04 03:01:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15832404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MeinongsJungleBook/pseuds/MeinongsJungleBook
Summary: Locked away in his prison cell, Starscream has nothing left but the projector Windblade gifted him and fantasies of a life he never led.





	And All That Could Have Been

**Author's Note:**

> For Windscream Week Day 4 - AU

Starscream sat on the bunk of his cell, hunched over the holo-projector he cradled in his hands. The figure it projected smiled up at him with a face that looked much like his own, but the expression it wore was alien to him. Its smile wasn’t a condescending smirk or gleefully malevolent grin, but a genuinely joyful expression of confidence and serenity that came from inner satisfaction with oneself rather than smugly negative appraisals of others. Starscream tried desperately to hold onto the memory of how that felt, but it already seemed so strange and distant, like a half-forgotten dream.

He remembered…clarity. Clarity like he had never known before in his 4 million years of existence. For one, brief, rapturous moment everything had been put into clear perspective, the doubts that plagued and paralysed him had fallen away, and he knew what he truly, deeply wanted. He knew who he was, or rather, who he truly wanted to be, not what other people told him to be. And then it was gone. Windblade had disconnected from him, he’d said something stupid, and she’d walked out, before it had all come crashing down as every one of his sins had caught up with him, and now here he was, rusting in a cell, a disgraced and pathetic husk huddled over the knowledge of what could have been.

That’s all he really had anymore, the idea of this other life where he was who he was supposed to have been from the start. He played it over and over in his head, the fantasy getting deeper and more elaborate each time as he reframed events from his life in terms of how they would have occurred if he’d been who he should have been. He imagined himself recognising Megatron’s madness and taking control of the Decepticons in the early days, steering them away from thuggery and mindless radicalism and instead using them to make Cybertron better, creating the true Golden Age that Megatron had always promised but could never deliver. He would lead the people in this Golden Age, not through fear, but by proving time and time again that he was worthy to lead them, and his people would not be oppressed, instead they would also actualise their best possible selves under his guidance.

Eventually Windblade entered into his fantasies; he imagined her coming to Cybertron for aide as she had in reality, but this time she would have found the Utopia her homeworld’s stories had promised, ready and willing to pull her ailing colony out of deprivation and ignorance. He wouldn’t have met her with distrust and threats, but instead he would have recognised the same drive to change the world for the better that existed within him, the same unconquerable force of will, and he would have aligned it with his own, making her his right hand. He would help her become everything she sought to be, freeing her from the shackles imposed on her by the dogmas of her home, and she would grow to become someone who could perhaps even challenge his supremacy as leader. But she wouldn’t, because she would see him as the worthy leader that he was, and he would not hold her back, but recognise when she had reached the point of becoming his equal, and respect her as so.

They would fall for each other – because how could they not? – and they would become not only equal leaders of a glorious empire that they would spread out across galaxy, but also conjunx endura sharing a deep and sacred intimacy. The pleasure they would take in each other would not stem from idealised fantasies they projected onto each other, but from recognising one another’s truth, and loving that truth as deeply as any pleasurable lie. As individuals they would be magnificent, but united together there would be no force that could oppose them, and the universe would bend gratefully to their will as they reshaped it in their image.

In his youth Starscream had been taken with the idea of having a conjunx endura with whom to share what would most definitely be his grand and epic destiny, but reality had long ago caused him to cast off that aspiration as a silly and naïve desire that would only hold him back and make him suffer. Yet after millions of years of letting that yearning wither away to the point where it no longer entered his mind, he suddenly wanted it again as fiercely as he wanted power, and respect, and to become who he was truly meant to be, and its deprivation tormented him just as much as being denied all the rest.

He had always wanted so very much, and he had experienced a sublime moment of knowing what it would be like to have those desires actualised, and now he couldn’t have any of it. Once again everything had trickled through his fingers, leaving him clutching only a reminder of all the things he could never have. The smile of the projection held no malice or judgement as it gazed at him in his pitiful state, and for that reason it mocked him all the more.


End file.
